The Star and the Shamrock

by Jean Grainger

  Erich ran out to the hall to answer it. ‘That’ll be Bud!’

  Sure enough, a tall, slim, very young man in RAF blues, cap under his arm, was standing at her front door. He looked to be around six feet tall, and his dark-red hair was Brylcreemed back from his open face. He had freckles and a crinkly smile.

  ‘Good evening, ma’am, I hope I’m not disturbin’ y’all?’ Elizabeth shot Erich a glance but smiled at the man.

  ‘No, not at all. Erich was just saying how you played football with the boys.’ Elizabeth struggled for something else to say.

  ‘I sure did, ma’am.’ He grinned. ‘It’s not like our football, but I’m getting the hang of it.’

  ‘Good… It’s…um…’ Elizabeth allowed her voice to trail off.

  ‘I’m sorry, ma’am, where are my manners? My name is Corporal Thomas Smith. But everyone calls me Bud.’ He stuck out his hand and she took it.

  ‘I am Mrs Elizabeth Klein, and this is Liesl. And you’ve already met Erich.’ She smiled.

  ‘Erich was tellin’ me that he was from Berlin, Germany?’

  She suppressed a smile. Americans always seemed to need to clarify both the city and the country. As if there were another, equally well known Berlin someplace.

  ‘That’s right.’ Elizabeth wondered where this was going.

  ‘And I thought maybe y’all could tell me a bit about it there?’

  ‘About Germany?’ Elizabeth was confused.

  ‘Well, yes, ma’am. My daddy’s family came from Germany, on my grandma’s side, I think, way back along, sometime in the 1800s, I reckon. Anyway, since we are gonna invade at some point onto mainland Europe, and my mama told me to be as prepared as I can be for any situation, I was hoping that maybe Erich could teach me some German – if that’s OK with you, of course?’

  Elizabeth looked down at the boy she considered her son. It was the first time she’d seen him really happy since the news of Peter’s death.

  Bud mistook her silence for reticence. ‘Or maybe you need to check with someone, ma’am? I can get you a reference from my CO saying I’m a decent guy if that would help?’

  She knew the kudos Erich would gain at school from being friends with not just an RAF airman but an American to boot, but she didn’t want to draw any further attention to herself. People in Ballycreggan were only just thawing after the Daniel episode, and she wanted to maintain her position within the community. Having a handsome albeit very young airman hanging around immediately after the departure of an alleged German spy wasn’t going to do anything for her reputation, however innocent the reason.

  Erich pulled on her hand. ‘Please, Elizabeth, I really want to.’ His eyes were pleading, and after all he’d been through, she couldn’t refuse him.

  ‘All right.’ She addressed Bud firmly. ‘But only once a week, OK? And it has to be here. He’s only nine, and I need to keep an eye on him.’

  Bud’s face lit up. ‘Thank you, ma’am, I really appreciate it. Erich told me how he can speak French and Italian as well as English and German, so I thought to myself, this is the teacher for me. I could come next Wednesday, around this time?’

  His enthusiasm was infectious, and she had to stifle a smile.

  ‘Elizabeth got a German dictionary in case she needed it for the refugees,’ Erich announced, as if he weren’t one himself. ‘But you won’t need that because I know all the words in English and in German.’

  Liesl caught Elizabeth’s glance and rolled her eyes slightly. Elizabeth knew Liesl had a much better grasp of languages than her brother, but she also knew that Erich needed Bud to be his friend. She smiled. If this Bud character was going to put a smile on their faces, he was as welcome as the flowers in May.

  All that night, she tossed and turned, unable to sleep, Liesl’s admonishment going round and round in her mind. If Daniel was her friend and she believed he was innocent, then why did she abandon him? Because Mr Morris told her to? Because of something Talia suggested? Because of what people would say? Because everyone else believed he was guilty? None of those reasons was good enough.

  She assumed Daniel was allowed to write and receive letters – Talia had written and he’d replied – though they were no doubt heavily censored, and yet he’d never written to her. Maybe she imagined the closeness? Maybe if she wrote to him now, he would wonder what on earth the local schoolmistress was thinking by getting in touch with him? Nothing had ever been said or acknowledged between them, so maybe she imagined the growing closeness because she wanted it to be true. She could feel her cheeks burn at the thought of him believing she was chasing him like some pathetic old spinster.

  As the weak dawn spread across the inky sky, she got up and pulled her mother’s old beige flannel dressing gown around her. She got a shock when she passed the oval mahogany mirror on the landing. Wrapped in her mother’s old robe and with her hair tied back in a bun as usual, she could have been Margaret. Had she turned into her own mother without realising it? Bitter, unfeeling, only willing to see her own side of any situation? She shuddered at the thought.

  Elizabeth crept downstairs so as not to wake the children and started to make a cup of cocoa. She’d made a decision – she was going to write to Daniel and at least give him the opportunity to tell her the truth if he wanted to. She owed him that at least.

  Of course, the moment the letter arrived at the prison in Belfast, word would undoubtedly come back to Ballycreggan. What if Mr Morris dismissed her for breaking her word? Perhaps she should tell him of her plan? Instantly, she put that idea from her mind. She was a grown woman who did not need his or anyone else’s permission to write a letter.

  She stirred the last of the cocoa into her mug and filled it with hot water and a little milk. It would be another week before she was entitled to get any more, so the children would have to survive without their bedtime drink.

  The mug was one she’d bought her mother for Christmas one year when she was around Liesl’s age. She’d found it in the sideboard with all the ‘good ware’ that was never used in the whole of her childhood.

  It was white china and had pink roses on it. She remembered saving up her pocket money to buy it, thinking it was so pretty. Her mother opened it on Christmas morning and said, ‘China is so hard to keep.’ And that was it. No mention of how expensive it was, or how Elizabeth had saved up so hard to buy it. Nothing. Just a complaint about how hard it was to wash and stop from chipping. Typical Margaret. And yet she kept it safe all these years, alongside her most treasured possessions. Her mother was a conundrum, that was for sure.

  Since coming home and eradicating all the dark-brown paint, the house of her childhood felt totally new, not at all like the one she grew up in. Having the children meant she had little time for reminiscences or sad lonely strolls down memory lane.

  But now, at three a.m., the same clock ticking on the dresser, the sepia photograph of her parents on the shelf, it all felt eerily familiar and she was suddenly ten years old again. Her father was gone – he had died two weeks before her tenth birthday – and she could still recall the pain of his loss.

  Jeremiah Bannon was a blacksmith, and his forge was at the other end of Ballycreggan. Her mother didn’t like her being there, but Elizabeth loved the smell of the furnace and the leather, and she could sit for hours watching her daddy shoeing horses in his big leather apron. Skittish colts and mares, big old cart horses and even one or two racing horses were brought to be shod, and all of them relaxed under Miah Bannon’s gentle hands. He would whisper into their ears, blow his breath into their nostrils and then expertly run his hands down each leg, from knee to fetlock. And without exception, the animals raised their hooves and allowed him to shoe them.

  He made farm implements as well, along with all sorts of other things. At the end of the day, he would wash up at the cold tap in the forge yard, and she would run down the street to meet him. Her father would carry her home, and she would bury her face in his neck, savouring the smell of him.

&nb
sp; She disliked her mother for as long as she could remember because of the way she treated her daddy. Nothing was ever good enough: He was too dirty coming home from the forge, he was too late, he didn’t know the local gossip, he had ruined his trousers. All she ever did was complain, and all he did in return was take it. Elizabeth was convinced her mother nagged him to death.

  One evening, as she was doing her homework at the kitchen table – her mother had forbidden her from running to meet him because she would ruin her dress – the local grocer knocked on their door to say that Miah had taken a turn (a euphemism for a heart attack) in the street. He had just been in Bridie’s little sweetshop buying her a lollipop. It was still in his pocket when they laid him out, and her mother had taken it and thrown it in the bin. Her last present from her father, and Margaret threw it away.

  Elizabeth blinked back the tears.

  There was no cake or any reference to her tenth birthday as they were in mourning, but she didn’t care; she just wanted her daddy back.

  Margaret never cried once throughout the endless days of people calling to the house with cakes and sandwiches. Elizabeth recalled the long hours in the days after he died, sitting beside her mother on the front pew of the church as the entire village and every farmer for twenty miles passed by and shook her hand to say they were ‘sorry for her troubles’. Throughout it all, Margaret was stoic. Elizabeth remembered thinking that her mother was actually enjoying it.

  The old priest’s housekeeper, Miss Tanner, died at the ripe old age of eighty, three months after Miah Bannon’s death, and Margaret stepped into her role temporarily. She arranged flowers, cleaned the brasses, laundered the priests’ vestments, and protected the priests from the parish. If you wanted to see Father O’Toole about anything, you had to first get through Mrs Bannon, a task close to impossible. The priests were minded like prize pigs, and the way she fawned over them made young Elizabeth cringe. But the priests called her a treasure and a godsend, and the temporary appointment inevitably became a permanent one.

  All through school, Elizabeth had been such a good girl, studying hard, never giving an ounce of trouble. But still, nothing pleased her mother. Why was she never good enough? Liesl and Erich were not her children, but she loved them so much, and she tried in every way to build them up and give them confidence; she couldn’t bear to see adults cut children down.

  When the Reverend Mother suggested she go to England, her enthusiasm had little to do with an interest in teaching or a love of England and a lot to do with getting away from Margaret and Ballycreggan.

  Little did she know on that day she left, at the ripe old age of sixteen and a half, green as grass, what life held in store. For twenty-one years, England had been good to her. It had given her a career she loved, a man she’d adored for the short time they were allowed, and a home.

  Rudi. She wished she still had his photograph. From that first evening she met him in the chip shop, he’d been the only boy for her. He was so full of life and fun. He thought her very serious, but up to the time she met him, that was all she’d known. Rudi brought light and laughter into her life. He made her feel special and loved and beautiful.

  Did she do it to defy her mother? She didn’t think so. She had wanted her mother to accept him, but she was foolish even to try. Margaret would not have accepted anyone – well, maybe the local doctor’s son or something like that. But Rudi had no qualifications, not even a trade – he just worked in his uncle’s chip shop – so he wouldn’t have been good enough anyway. The fact that he was Jewish just put the tin hat on it.

  What would they say now if they could see her? Her father, Margaret, Rudi? Back in this house, with two Jewish German children.

  She liked to think her father and Rudi would be proud of her. They’d never met, but they were both men who stood for something. She knew they would have liked each other. They were decent and hardworking and kind. Just like Daniel. Daddy and Rudi would both have liked Daniel too. They would have seen those qualities in him, that decency and goodness, and they would see how he made her feel.

  She stood and went to the sitting room, opened her writing bureau, a lovely old piece that her mother had hated because it came from her father’s home in County Cavan, and extracted her writing pad and a pen.

  By the light of the lamp, she began.

  Dear Daniel,

  I hope this letter finds you well and healthy. I am sorry for not writing before; I didn’t know what to say. You have been on my mind since you left, and I wanted you to know…

  She paused. What did she want him to know?

  …that my experience was that you are a good man. I don’t know any of the details, and I cannot explain why that map was where it was or who made it, but if you want to get in touch, I would be happy to hear from you.

  Best wishes,

  Elizabeth

  She folded it and placed it in an envelope before she had time to change her mind. It was a short letter, and nobody could accuse her of anything from reading it. He might not reply, and that was fine, but at least she’d reached out to him and felt like she’d done the right thing.

  The following morning, she put the letter in the postbox in between two other letters she needed to send, and nobody was any the wiser.

  Chapter 19

  Bud and Erich sat at the kitchen table, and Erich was explaining how the definite article changed in German depending on whether the noun was masculine, feminine or neutral. The weekly German lessons consisted of about fifteen minutes of German, followed by lots of joking around and, finally, Bud eating with them.

  At first, Elizabeth was wary. Why would someone like Bud want to be friends with two German children? But she soon realised Bud was homesick. He wasn’t cut out for the military life, and he missed having a family around.

  ‘But, Erich, how am I supposed to know what gender every single thing is?’ Bud complained. ‘Like, if I say the dog is brown, then it’s der Hund ist braun, but I can’t say, “Ich sehe der Hund”?’ He ran his hands through his copper-coloured hair in frustration.

  ‘No.’ Erich giggled. ‘It’s Ich sehe den Hund.’

  ‘But why, lil’ man?’ Bud leaned back and groaned. ‘This is sure one hard language you got here. I ain’t never gonna get it.’

  ‘I dunno,’ Erich admitted. ‘You just don’t say it that way.’

  Liesl looked up from her homework. ‘It’s because in the first sentence, the dog is masculine and is the subject of the sentence, so it takes der as the definite article. But in the second sentence, the dog is the object, and it is accusative case, so der changes to den.’

  Bud looked over at her and grinned. ‘How come y’all are so smart? When I was your age, I could jes’ about catch a fish or say my prayers, but y’all know so much.’

  Liesl and Erich giggled. They loved to hear Bud speak with his drawling American accent. He would tell them about Biloxi, where he was from, in the state of Mississippi.

  ‘Tell us about the beach,’ Erich begged, bored with the grammar lesson. He also hated to be outdone by his sister – Bud was his student. The stories of the seaside fascinated Erich; he’d never seen a beach before he left Germany.

  ‘Oh, the beach in Biloxi is the most beautiful beach in the whole wide world.’ He told the story the same way each time. He’d get all wistful and the children would giggle. ‘You can sit and watch the sun set over the Gulf of Mexico and eat an ice cream and swim in the sea, and I tell you, it’s God’s own country. It’s so lovely that I hated to leave, but I knew there was a job to be done. And I used to watch the seagulls and think to myself, boy, imagine what it’s like to fly. I went and told my daddy I was gonna be a pilot over here in Great Britain, and you know what he says to me?’

  The children knew this story by heart but loved hearing it. They parroted back, in a perfect Mississippi drawl, ‘Boy, the only way you’s gonna fly is if you stick some of them there turkey feathers where the sun don’t shine and take a long run off a short pier.’ />
  The story always ended with Bud and the children in paroxysms of laughter.

  Life had fallen into a pattern of school and friends and trying to make do on the rations. The children usually went to the farm on Friday nights for Shabbat, and Liesl was preparing with some of her friends for her bat mitzvah.

  The ceremony was to take place on the first Shabbat after her birthday. She was excited and knew her prayers from the Book of Psalms and the siddur perfectly.

  The rabbi was conservative but had come round to the idea of girls being treated just the same as their brothers. After Daniel spoke on Liesl’s behalf and convinced him to allow her and the other girls to have their rite of passage into adulthood, the rabbi had softened his attitude and Daniel had earned Liesl’s unwavering loyalty. There was a sense that they were all in it together anyway; they might as well be completely in it. Rabbi Frank insisted that girls did not read aloud from the Torah when there was a quorum of ten men to do so, and while it rankled with Elizabeth that Liesl would be discriminated against like that, it wasn’t her business. All churches, including the one her mother was so devoted to, were the same in her opinion – run by men, favouring men and trying to denigrate women. She had no time for any of them, but she hoped she was doing the right thing by the children for Ariella and Peter.

  Talia called often in the evenings as well these days, she and Liesl falling into a kind of grudging acceptance of each other. Liesl was quiet when Talia came round and generally went off to read a book, but she was reasonably polite when she had to be.

  Talia seemed to have taken a bit of a shine to Bud, and he to her. They met one evening at Elizabeth’s, and Talia admitted shyly that he’d taken her to the pictures at Donaghadee and was even talking about a trip to Belfast when he got some leave.

  It was nice to see the young woman with something to look forward to. Talia and everyone on the farm worked so hard, and they all lived in such a constant state of fear about their loved ones and the future, that it was hard to inject any joy. Bud seemed to cheer Talia up to no end, and he’d told Elizabeth that he really liked her.